Neha Saraf completed her bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Vellore Institute of Technology in India. She spent a year working as a consultant for Microsoft India’s Dynamics 365 product line before moving to New York City for the M.S. in data science program through the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Columbia University. Today, the 2020 alumna is a data scientist with Oracle in Redwood City, Calif.

Congratulations! Tell us about your new role with Oracle.

I work as a data scientist for Oracle Applications Labs. I am currently working on their document processing platform. I cannot share many details, but I have always been passionate about doing everything from start to end so that I get exposure to the whole product. I am glad that I get to handle this specific project within my team, where I am involved from the data collection process to applying deep learning algorithms and making a service out of it for internal use.

Which of your undergraduate courses prepared you for the DSI curriculum? What was your favorite course at DSI?

The courses that definitely helped me with graduate school were algorithms and data structures and elementary probability. My favorite DSI course was Machine Learning taught by John Paisley. He is an excellent professor and explained the mathematical proofs of every machine learning algorithm in detail.

How was your capstone experience?

My capstone project was Unsupervised Entity Resolution on Multi-Type Graph and was provided by Capital One. We worked in a team of four and were given a research paper which was to be converted into working code. The project was very interesting as it was based on unsupervised methods of data science which I had never worked on. The project aimed at converting a real-time product price data to a multi-type resource direction framework graph. The algorithm that we implemented was then used to solve redundancy in prices of similar products, but with different names.

What will you miss most about living in New York City?

When I came to pursue my higher education in New York City, it was not only my first time in New York, but also my first destination outside of India altogether. It was completely different from my hometown in terms of lifestyle, language, and culture. It was a little difficult for me to adapt in the beginning mainly because of my accent, but it was always a dream to live in Manhattan. I met so many people both in and out of school. Everyone came from different backgrounds and races. I got to know about their culture which was so different from what we follow back in India, but still, everyone found at least one common thing to bond over with one another. I got to experience diversity and that was the best part of New York for me. We have a saying in Hindi: “As the country is, same should be the guise.” So I guess this is what I followed for adapting to living in New York.  

— Sharnice Ottley